Why Twitter is so successful ?

Posted in Marketing & Strategy Articles, Total Reads: 16183
, Published on 31 October 2010

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In 2005-06 a phenomenon called Orkut hit India. People were totally hooked on to it. Everone created a profile on it in 2006 and after that a social networking revolution came to india. In US, Europe etc this had already started 2-3 years back. MySpace, Facebook etc were already super popular.

India also caught on well with all these trends. Orkut became a passe as soon as Facebook took over for Personal and social networks, LinkedIn for professional and MySpace just for timepass in the Indian context.

Then suddenly new words started to make some noise in the cyber space. These words twitter and tweets took the world by surprise and shook it! They introduced the concept of microblogging and SMS type social networking.

Twitter has changed a lot of things. When people first heard about it and saw it, everyone thought,"one more in the crowd but interesting name!"

But then this word kept on creeping on the Internet, magazines.

People made their own profile and started to TWEET.

Sites like MySpace, Orkut and Facebook had already changed the way the world communicated, but twitter has changed the way the world works.

Twitter has made marketers rethink the way they market. You can follow (twitter term) any company and get their tweets on your twitter profile. On twitter you can find more companies than users. All have their twitter accounts and send tweets to their followers and it is the new age marketing.

New product launches, new ads, relaunches, news about the company or even results, the companies send it through tweets instantly. Viral marketing has a whole new dimension and medium to grow.

Bloggers use Twitter to announce the new posts instantly as the post is published.

Celebrities use tweets to keep in touch with their fans.

Friends use it just to keep in touch with each other.

People can share links and news.

It helps you say things quickly and simply.

Ministers and Govts too use it to keep in touch with the people. Even Barack Obama does it.

All news networks like CNN, BBC have their tweets going on. People can follow them for instant news.

Many of the things above are also possible on Facebook and are done on too, but then why twitter is what it is?

Nobody knows why twitter has become so successful. Some say theyre lucky, some say chance and some say it was good.

But when you see the data you think why is this SMS type site 25th ranked site in the world with 26 million monthly users just in the US. In Social networking, it ranks 3rd after Facebook and MySpace. You can have more info on Twitter data and demographics here.

So Why is Twitter so successful?

The reasons we gathered from different websites are listed below.

It’s an extremely easy concept for anyone to pickk up, without any training.

It brings a novelty factor and a new arena within which marketeers and tech enthusiast can experiment, and inevitably end up doing a viral marketing for twitter, due to their initial enthusiasm about the website.

Most users today find blogging or web authoring cumbersome, but will happily Twitter away as it’s easy and quick.

Users don’t have time to write and read anymore and Twitter messages are well within the threshold of average user’s attention span.

Internet suffers from a massive problem of information overload and Twitter seems to offer a way out of it to some extent.

It is still virtually impossible to do more serious work (blogging and authoring) on modern portable devices today, even Net Books. The most that can really be done is an odd Twitter message here and there, so most users can then spend time doing what they can, with the tools that are available to them today.

Internet just wasn’t designed for big, lengthy, hard to read articles and books. So users are much more likely to read tweets and stick to reading them over longer period of time.

It’s a fairly immediate way of communicating and can be very personal, which beats most other forms of communication.

Users like trivia and nonsense as we live in the world of entertainment today and Twitter offers much light information, non-stop at every one’s easy disposal.

The curiosity and celebrity backing which has surrounded Twitter, drives users towards experimenting with it and trying to work out what the hype is really all about.